Science + Literature: Eco-Poetics and the Modern Apocalypse

Meltwater by Claire Wahmanholm—a 2025 Science + Literature Selected Title—shows at once the fragility, devastation, and beauty of our world and humans’ existence on it. Join Wahmanholm for a reading and conversation on eco-poetics as inspiration and rallying cry. Moderated by Donika Kelly, author of The Renunciations and Bestiary.

Limited free copies of Meltwater will be available at the event, first come, first served. The program will be followed by a book signing.

Presented in partnership with the National Book Foundation and the University of California, Riverside, in collaboration with the Department of Creative Writing, College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, Writers Week, and the School of Medicine’s Medical Health & Humanities Designated Emphasis.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

Claire Wahmanholm is the author of Wilder, Redmouth, and, most recently, Meltwater, which was a finalist for the 2024 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the 2024 Minnesota Book Award. A 2020 McKnight Writer Fellow, and the winner of the 2022 Montreal International Poetry Prize, she lives in the Twin Cities.

Donika Kelly is the author of The Renunciations, winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and Bestiary, the winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and a Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and a founding member of the collective Poets at the End of the World. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She is an associate professor in the English Department at the University of Iowa.

Host or Publisher National Book Foundation